TEHRAN — As Ankara and Tel Aviv moved on to normalize ties, pundits have looked at Turkey as a country that is trying to have its cake and eat it too.

The Israeli regime and Turkey declared full normalization of relations and the return of their ambassadors to Ankara and Tel Aviv on Wednesday.

The announcement brings a four-year diplomatic crisis between Turkey and the regime to an end.

According to the Israeli prime minister's office, the agreement was struck on Tuesday during a phone discussion between the directors general of the Israeli and Turkish foreign ministries.

The decision to restore full diplomatic representation was made mutually, with the Israeli regime’s ambassador and consul general returning to Ankara and Istanbul and the Turkish envoy and consul general returning to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a press conference in Ankara that Turkey will soon nominate an ambassador to Tel Aviv and that a joint economic summit will be hosted by Ankara and Tel Aviv in the coming weeks. 

However, in an odd turn of events, he went on to say that Ankara will continue to back the Palestinians.

Cavusoglu said the decision will allow mostly Muslim, but prominently secular Turkey, to lobby for Palestinian interests in Gaza, and the West Bank including Jerusalem.

The return of ambassadors "is important to improving bilateral ties," Cavusoglu said, adding, "As we have always said, we will continue to defend the rights of Palestinians."

This claim is in line with the claim of the Arab normalizers who said that after the normalization agreements, establishing relations with Tel Aviv would help the Palestinian cause and speed up the process of the two-state solution. Now, after two years, they were not even willing to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords with Tel Aviv.

Yair Lapid, the Israeli regime’s premier, spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hours after the news broke out. 

Erdogan, according to the Turkish presidency, favors the growth of cooperation and discussion between Turkey and Israel “on a sustainable basis and on the basis of mutual sensitivities.”

Over the last decade, Israeli-Turkish relations have been strained, most recently in 2018 when the U.S. relocated its embassy to Jerusalem and Turkey removed the Israeli ambassador from Ankara.

Erdogan began direct interaction with the regime with a congratulatory phone call after the regime’s President Isaac Herzog was inaugurated in July 2021. They've spoken on the phone multiple times, and Herzog recently met Erdogan in Ankara. Cavusoglu paid his first visit to Tel Aviv as Turkish foreign minister in 15 years in May.

Relations between Turkey and the Zionist regime have been fraught since the Mavi Marmara ship tragedy 12 years ago when Tel Aviv assaulted the naval fleet transporting humanitarian aid for Gazans under the name of the Freedom Fleet and killed ten crew members.

Erdogan’s policy of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds has long been criticized by political pundits. A case in point is his separate meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Erdogan saw the Ukraine crisis as an opportunity to act on a global scale and bring himself closer to the West. As a result, efforts to promote talks between Moscow and Kyiv, the transfer of grain ships from Ukrainian ports, the dispatch of drones to Kyiv, and the criticism of Russia's actions and stances have been put on his agenda for months. Ankara's move to normalize relations with Tel Aviv came as a surprise to several analysts.

While discussing the ongoing battle with Russia with Zelensky and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Erdogan settled this matter with the Israeli regime. Some observers believe that this situation was staged and that Erdogan was attempting to demonstrate his capacity to manage multiple major events at the same time in a short period of time. This was not management in the dimensions of expertise. Rather, it was deemed unacceptable to close an important case at an inconvenient moment.

Given that Turkey never truly severed links with the Israeli regime, either on security or economic level, Ankara's choice to normalize relations with the regime can be interpreted as implying that Turkey never had deep-seated issues with the Israeli regime. Erdogan's demonstration of support for Palestine and Palestinians is mainly a media ruse to present himself as a good guy.